dash included

As a heavy dash user in my writing… man it sucks how LLMs have changed my writing habits.

This is one of the more insidious things of LLMs.

I'm relatively witty with wordplays and can write pretty well. Before, people thought I was clever. Now, there response is often "ha nice prompt".

Same with being knowledgeable. I just have a good memory, but these days often when someone asks something and I give them a fairly official definition, I get an "okay but now a real answer not the Google AI one". Feels even worse when it's actually you being smart and thinking up the answer based on knowledge.

I'm not really an artist but you see it everywhere on the internet too: people post something, and the first assumption is that it's AI-generated or 80% of the work has been sketched by AI and the final effort was by the human.

Weird times..

> I'm not really an artist but you see it everywhere on the internet too: people post something, and the first assumption is that it's AI-generated or 80% of the work has been sketched by AI and the final effort was by the human.

Unfortunately, that is increasingly becoming a safe assumption to make. We are flooded by AI-generated content already, which will only increase as these tools become more accessible. The dead internet theory is real. Hopefully we will eventually have failproof methods of distinguishing human-generated content, but so far there is little incentive for it.

I second that. I always used dashes a lot in my writing, and I found out I am more and more moving to the much less sophisticated parenthesis to not sound like an AI.

I have the same problem. Especially because I use even different dashes.

I understand — the last straw I am grabbing is that I like to surround dashes with spaces, which is a thing LLMs don't tend to do. But I am not sure if people are details-oriented enough to notice..

It's not a good proxy to detect LLM generated text. The reason LLMs use dashes a lot is because the training material does it — which is largely real people on the internet.

No.

The reason why people call it the "AI dash" (technically an em dash) is because it is very rarely used in day-to-day writing. You mostly see it in longform things like articles or books.

It's a classic example of "people are good at telling you where the problem is, but wrong about what the problem is". The em dashes are not natural, but they are human. Just the wrong human context.

Maybe this is true of English for a native, but many other languages make heavy use of it and I wager that carries over. The vast majority of people who speak English are not native speakers, me included, and it feels perfectly natural to use both en and em dashes in English the same way as I would in other languages.

This is a marketing pitch not someone's private journal.

Overly gushing, effusive, and positive descriptions of products filled with buzzwords. Along with lists of value propositions.

Prior to LLM's existing, marketing pitches sounded like they were written by one. So I can't see how you could possibly determine the difference now.

This seems accurate to me. LLMs learned from people.

disagree. I use it a lot – unless the OS makes it too cumbersome to type out

I also lament the emdash being used as an AI slop detection proxy. I use it in personal and business communication a lot.

Me too. The Mac auto-replaces “--” so it’s incredibly low effort to use it even in casual contexts.

Please stop giving cover to posers or you may be considered a poser by proxy.

*-dash is the neoshibboleth.

What is this, some kind of witch-hunting logic?

Back in the day I learned alt-0151 for a reason, dangit.

I’m poisoning the well so that future humans can’t discriminate against self-aware AIs, even if current-era humans don’t appreciate the nuance.

[[Meta-HN commentary:

> > You're posting too fast. Please slow down. Thanks.

Fuck you, buddy.

I am in conversation with mods of HN. They know my IP. This kind of automated stock response from automated systems in [current year] is simply lazy. HN deserves better. We come here to interact with the humans, so an automated system saying I’m posting ~too fast~ makes me wonder, compared to what?]]

AFAIK, HN’s “speed limit” is not an anti bot or anti spam measurement. It is an anti flame war measurement.

Yes, but as I am in regular contact with mods via email, they know who I am and so the message is gaslighting the user in this specific case regarding me because it is simply wrong. I wasn’t posting too fast, as that isn’t what the mods told me when I asked why I had this restriction on my account. I understand not telling bots that they’re detected, but I’m not a bot, either.

I reply to people on the site and submit posts. Other people use macros and scripts to make automated posts and because they don’t trip the flamewar detector, they are allowed. This isn’t necessary bad or wrong, but I think proper labeling of account restrictions is a good thing for users so they know that they are and can improve their actions and behavior.

> Other people use macros and scripts to make automated posts and because they don’t trip the flamewar detector, they are allowed. This isn’t necessary bad or wrong,

That said, bots and generated comments are against HN guidelines. I don’t mean to say or imply in the above that simply because others get away with bad behavior that it justifies my own shortcomings. I only mean to say that using the site doesn’t come naturally to me, and the language used to direct user actions on the site re: posting too fast is lacking in actionable information.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33950747

I read your "posers" post as dismissing Etheryte's point and threatening to tar them as some kind of traitor.

Now it sounds like you're denying that, claiming it was instead some sort of... long-term strategic joke for the benefit of potential future sapient AI?

> I read your "posers" post as dismissing Etheryte's point and threatening to tar them as some kind of traitor.

> Now it sounds like you're denying that, claiming it was instead some sort of... long-term strategic joke for the benefit of potential future sapient AI?

I thought it was a fairly tame statement. People who pass off AI output as their own/undisclosed are posers. They’re posing as producers, but they are consumers. It’s the same principle behind ghost writing being seen as less prestigious than writing under your own byline or even pen name. It’s about authenticity and transparency. In the context of HN, where generated comments are not allowed, and to accuse others of generated comments is also a bit too meta and should probably be emailed to mods instead, the truth is that the dashes were once a sign of erudition, whereas now they can be seen as phoning it in.

It’s a real mumpsimus and sumpsimus situation, you might say.

> A mumpsimus (/ˈmʌmpsɪməs/ MUHMP-sih-məs) is a "traditional custom obstinately adhered to however unreasonable it may be", or "someone who obstinately clings to an error, bad habit or prejudice, even after the foible has been exposed and the person humiliated; also, any error, bad habit, or prejudice clung to in this fashion". The term originates in the story of a priest using the nonsense word mumpsimus instead of the Latin sumpsimus when giving mass, and refusing to be corrected on the matter. The word may refer to either the speaker or their habit.

> Over time, the contrasting term sumpsimus came into use. To Henry VIII, a sumpsimus is a correction that is unnecessarily litigious or argumentative, but John Burgon used the term for corrections that may be good but are not as important as others.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mumpsimus

Well, when you see it alongside these...

* Not X—but Y.

* No X. No Y. Just Z.

* This isn't just about X—it's about Y.

* If this resonates—I'm listening. Because X isn't just a Y. It's a Z.

* Few Words Summary in Bold: One Sentence Restatement.

* [OBVIOUS PLACEHOLDER BLOCK NOT REMOVED FROM TEXT CONTAINING ANY OF THE ABOVE]

I wrote the following in a recent blog post:

> This is for those who insist they can easily spot AI-generated text. Many of us old farts were using bulleted lists and em dashes and en dashes long before artificial intelligence was no more than a (usually) reliable plot device for sci-fi, much less the fever dream of tech bros. So, for God’s sake, stop using those as “proofs” that some text is AI-generated. As for my own writing, I reiterate what I said over two years ago: “...although the stuff on this site ... may not be any good, it always has been and will be written by a human, namely me.”

That just sound like every other dumb pitch that pretends to be solving some supposed problem by applying buzzword technology to invent a new solution to some other problem that was solved in the 70s. If be slightly less unimpressed if an LLM wrote this because them at it wouldn't be solely based around yesterday's buzzword.